With significant technological advances made in the telecommunications industry over the last decade, communication companies have continually developed new and attractive ways to provide entertainment, information and communication services to customers in order to remain competitive in the market. For cable and other content service providers in particular, one such development has been the delivery of anytime, in-home access to digital content, commonly referred to as on-demand programming. Digital content or simply content may refer broadly to the information contained in a transmitted signal that provides value to an end-user/audience, and includes, for example, movies, television shows, news broadcasts, and other forms of media. With the advent of more sophisticated mobile telecommunication devices, viewing movies, television shows, news broadcasts, and other forms of media on-demand has become extremely popular. As a result, it has become increasingly burdensome to ensure that only users who are entitled to view certain protected digital content are able to gain access to such content.
When a client (e.g., subscriber to a content service provider, customer, service purchaser, user, etc.) makes a request for a particular item of digital content, the server hosting such content must make an access control determination based on the client's entitlement data (e.g., the user's subscription plan) and the content's metadata (attributes about the specific content requested, for example the title of a program (e.g., an episode name), copyright year, actors or actresses in a movie or show, length, content provider and the like) before the server grants the client access to the requested content. Entitlement data may be piece or pieces of data about a subscriber that inform a determination of his or her rights to access certain content items or types of content. Content metadata may be a piece or pieces of data about a piece of content that inform a determination of a subscriber's rights to access that content. Currently, client entitlement data and content metadata lookups are usually performed at the time of the request by the content server. With increasing demand for content, a content server may be overloaded with requests and require additional resources to obtain entitlement data and/or content metadata for each content request.